Enchanted Wood Preschool- Bean Road

⛺️ Den Building Day ⛺️

A huge thank you to everyone who joined us for our Den Building Day. Every year your creations get bigger, better, and even more imaginative, and this year was no exception.

The children absolutely loved spending this special time with you — planning, building, problem‑solving, and getting creative together. Moments like these develop teamwork, spark imagination, and create memories they talk about long after the day is over.

☀️ This Week in Rabbits — Summer Explorers!

The Rabbits have had a fun week diving into our summer theme through creativity, sensory play, and lots of imaginative fun.

🌞 Play Dough Suns

At the play dough table we squashed, squeezed, rolled, and pressed our bright yellow dough to make our very own suns. The children added pasta and pom poms to give their creations texture and personality, supporting fine motor strength and creativity.

🌼 Balloon‑Printed Summer Flowers

We loved creating colourful summer flowers by dipping balloons into paint and printing with them. The children explored bright colours, patterns, and shape as they experimented with this fun technique.

🌈 Colourful Rice Tray

Our vibrant rice tray invited lots of scooping, pouring, filling, and emptying. The children watched the rice fall through funnels and began using early maths language such as “full”, “empty”, “more”, and “less”. A brilliant hands‑on early maths moment.

🏖️ Sand Play Adventures

The sand tuff tray was a huge hit this week. The Rabbits built sandcastles, made marks, and explored textures with their hands and tools. This supported sensory exploration and early writing confidence.

🍦 Ice Cream Shop Role Play

We finished the week with a visit to our pretend ice cream shop. The children took turns being the customer and the shop assistant, chatting about their favourite flavours and practising turn‑taking and language skills.

📚Book of the Week: Sharing a Shell
🎶Song of the Week: The Sun Has Got His Hat On
✋🏽Sign of the Week: Summer

☀️ This Week in Hedgehogs — Summer Fun (without the sun!)

The Hedgehogs have explored our summer theme through play, imagination, and hands‑on learning.

🍦 Ice Cream Parlour Role Play

Our week began with a trip to the ice cream parlour where the children enjoyed choosing different “ice creams” and lollies. They took turns being the customer and the seller, practising turn‑taking, language skills, and imaginative play.

✍️ Sand Mark Making

In our sandy mark making tray the children chose to write numbers, letters, or create their own patterns. This supported early writing confidence and fine motor development in a playful, sensory way.

🍋 Citrus Ice Science

A highlight of the week was breaking ice to make citrus drinks. The children crushed fruit, mixed it with ice, and watched closely as it melted. This sparked brilliant curiosity and conversations about how ice melts and how it’s made — a perfect early science moment.

🏴‍☠️ Pirate Adventures

Our pirate small world setup captured everyone’s imagination. The children became fully absorbed in using maps to find treasure — so much so that they made their own maps using tea bags to age the paper. This encouraged creative storytelling, problem‑solving, and collaborative play.

🎨 Craft Table Creations

At the craft table, the children made their own ice creams using a variety of materials. They explored textures, colours, and shapes while expressing their creativity.

👐 Play Dough & Flowers

We made our own play dough this week, strengthening fine motor skills through mixing, rolling, and shaping. The children then added flowers to create beautiful patterns.

🎣 Fishing for Numbers

To round off our summer fun, we went fishing for numbers, helping the children build number recognition and coordination. They were so proud each time they caught a number and named it confidently.

📚 Book of the Week - Sharing a Shell
🎶 Song of the Week - The Sun has got his Hat on
✋🏽 Sign of the Week - Summer
🗣️ Sound of the Week - ‘b’

✨ Carnival & Pride Week in Rabbits! ✨

🌈 What a joyful and colourful week we’ve had in Rabbits as we explored the themes of Carnival and Pride — celebrating inclusion, creativity, diversity, and the importance of belonging.

🎭 Carnival Role‑Play Fun
Our Carnival‑themed areas were full of excitement. The children loved performing on our musical stage — singing, making music, and expressing themselves with confidence. In our Carnival kitchen, they enjoyed imaginative play and building communication skills.

🏳️‍🌈 Belonging
Through stories, discussions, and activities, we talked about families — how every family is unique and special.

🎨 Creative Crafts
The children made vibrant Carnival masks and rainbow artwork using tissue paper. These activities encouraged creativity and supported fine motor skills through scrunching, pinching, and sticking.

🌈 Sensory & Exploration Play
• In the water tray, the children explored different family figures, sparking lovely conversations about relationships.
• Our rainbow rice tray was a big hit, offering opportunities for scooping, pouring, and transferring — great for both fine and gross motor development.
• The fishing game encouraged hand‑eye coordination and concentration as the children caught fish and placed them into their own mini tanks.
• A sensory tray of shaving foam, sprinkles, and coloured powder paint invited the children to explore textures, mix colours, and enjoy mark‑making.

🎉 Festival Celebration
To end the week, we held our very own mini festival! The children danced with scarves, enjoyed music, and celebrated together.

📚 Book of the Week: Confetti
🗣️ Goldilocks Words: celebration, family, love

🌈 Hedgehogs Carnival & Pride Celebrations

What a wonderfully vibrant week it has been in Hedgehogs as we celebrated Carnival and Pride. Even without much sunshine outdoors, the children brought all the brightness we needed — arriving each day dressed in bright colours that filled our room with warmth and excitement.

🍦 Creative Carnival Play

• Shaving foam ice creams — The children loved scooping, counting, and measuring as they created their own carnival ice creams, sharing their creations with friends.
• Magical potion making — Mixing, pouring, emptying, and experimenting with quantities gave us a fantastic opportunity to explore early maths in a playful, imaginative way.

🎨 Rainbow Crafts & Mark Making

• At the craft table, the children created beautiful rainbow artwork, exploring colour, pattern, and creativity.
• In our rainbow flour trays, the children enjoyed mark making — forming shapes, letters, and expressive patterns across the colourful backgrounds.

🔢 Maths Through Colour & Play

• Using rainbow Pom Poms and Numicon, the children practised counting, matching, and problem‑solving.
• These hands‑on activities supported number recognition and early reasoning skills in a fun, sensory way.

🔤 Phonics Fun

• We went on a rainbow letter hunt, practising our Jolly Phonics skills as we searched for sounds around the room.
• Our sound of the week was ‘f’, which we explored through songs, actions, and playful activities.

🎶 Music, Movement & Expression

• We welcomed Mangotree Kids for our djembe drumming session.
• The children had lots and lots of fun dancing, moving, and expressing themselves through music.
• We explored rhythm using instruments, playing to the beat and even creating our own carnival‑inspired sounds.

🎭 Carnival Role Play

• Our carnival role‑play area was a huge hit — the children prepared food, performed on stage, and shared their talents with friends and teachers.
• This encouraged confidence, communication, and imaginative storytelling.

📚 Book of the Week - Confetti, a perfect celebration of love and life.

🐰This Week in the Rabbits🐰

This week in Rabbits, we have been following the children’s interests to support a deeper level of learning through play and exploration.

👶🏼 The children thoroughly enjoyed spending time in the role-play area, caring for the babies and taking part in a princess picnic. These experiences encouraged imaginative play, communication skills, and language development as the children acted out different scenarios and shared ideas with their friends.

🚂 In our small world areas, the children explored cars, trains, and a village setup. These activities opportunities to develop language skills while encouraging cooperative play and social interactions.

🐄 Our sensory activity this week was a farm milking station, where the children used scoops, funnels, and containers to pour and transfer the milk. Through this hands-on experience, they explored early mathematical concepts such as capacity, empty, full, more, and less, whilst developing their hand-eye coordination and fine motor skills.

🦖The children also had great fun with a frozen dinosaur dig. Using a variety of tools to carefully free the dinosaurs from the ice helped to strengthen both fine and gross motor skills, as well as encouraging perseverance, curiosity, and investigation.

🎨 For our creative activities, the children were invited to design and create their own artwork using a range of craft materials and embellishments. Some children also spent time practising their drawing skills, supporting their ability to represent ideas and give meaning to their marks and pictures.

👍 We also learned a new song this week, “Tommy Thumb”. The children thoroughly enjoyed joining in with the actions and movements, helping to develop listening skills, coordination, and confidence whilst having lots of fun together.

🦔 This Week in Hedgehogs 🦔

This week the Hedgehogs have been busy exploring a wide range of exciting activities, building confidence, creativity, and physical skills through rich, hands‑on play.

🧚‍♀️ Fairy Sand Mark Making

The children loved learning and mark making in our fairy sand trays, experimenting with patterns, shapes, letters, and early writing. This sensory setup encouraged imagination and supported fine motor development.

🤸‍♂️ Gross Motor Fun

We got physical this week, practising our gross motor skills in lots of different ways.
The children balanced across the beam in creative positions and worked hard to throw beanbags into the correct coloured hoops, building coordination, strength, and colour recognition.

🎨 Still Life Exploration

Our still‑life painting set up invited the children to look closely, observe carefully, and create their own interpretations of flowers — a lovely opportunity to slow down, focus, and express themselves artistically.

🧵 Playdough Creations

Playdough continues to be a Hedgehog favourite. This week the children added a variety of materials and used tools such as scissors and mirrors to explore textures, shapes, and imaginative play. Wonderful for strengthening hands and encouraging creativity.

📮 Post Office Role Play

Our Post Office role‑play area was a huge success. The children enjoyed mark making letters and posting them into the post box. They took turns to be the post office worker and the customer. This supported communication, turn‑taking, and early literacy in a meaningful, playful way.

Our sound of the week this week was ‘l’.

👮‍♀️ This Week in Rabbits: People Who Help Us

This week, the Rabbits have been learning all about people who help us, exploring the important roles that doctors, vets, firefighters, police officers and dentists play in our community.

👣 Becoming Police Officers

In our role‑play police station, the children became little police officers, taking their own fingerprints and matching them to the correct numbers on their hands. This activity supported problem‑solving and number recognition.

🍼 Caring for Babies in the Clinic

The children loved spending time in our baby clinic, where they fed, weighed and cared for baby dolls. This nurturing play helped develop empathy, language skills, and an understanding of how we look after others.

😁 Dentist Challenge

One of the highlights of the week was our dentist challenge. Using blocks and play dough, the children practised “flossing” by threading pipe cleaners between the blocks to remove the play dough. This was brilliant for strengthening fine motor skills while learning about the importance of brushing and keeping our teeth healthy.

🚒 Small World Fire Station & Village

In our small world areas, the children explored a busy fire station with fire engines and a village filled with police officers, firefighters and other community helpers. These setups encouraged storytelling, imagination, and lots of lovely language.

🎨 Crafts

For our creative activities, the children made “plaster people”, talking about different parts of the body and placing plasters onto them. They also designed and created their very own police cars, which they were incredibly proud of.

We also talked about how to call 999 in an emergency and discussed when it is important to ask for help from trusted adults and emergency services.

🎶 Song of the week: Miss Polly Had a Dolly
🤲🏼 Sign of the week: Nurse
🗣️ Goldilocks words: help, police, doctor

🇬🇧🌳 We had a lovely Forest School session today celebrating VE Day. The children learned that it marks 81 years since the end of World War II and how people celebrated peace with street parties.

🎖️ Imaginative Play & Teamwork

The children created their own army bunker and made camouflage hats before heading into the bushes to pretend they were hiding from the enemy. This role play encouraged teamwork, storytelling and problem‑solving in a hands‑on, meaningful way.

🎨 Creative VE Day Activities

To continue our celebrations, the children enjoyed a range of themed activities:

• VE Day Flags: Designing and decorating colourful flags inspired by the red, white and blue of the Union Jack.
• Mud Kitchen Tea Party: Using coloured water and flower petals, the children created their own muddy “street party” tea celebration.
• Medal Colouring: Carefully colouring medal pictures in VE Day colours.
• Ribbon Sticks: Wrapping ribbons around sticks to create swirling celebration wands — a brilliant activity for developing fine motor skills.

🗣️ Goldilocks Words of the Day - victory and camouflage. The children explored how camouflage helps people or objects blend into their surroundings, noticing how their hats and bunker colours helped them disappear into the bushes during play.

👩‍🚒👮‍♀️ This Week in Hedgehogs: People Who Help Us

This week our topic has been People Who Help Us, and the children have enjoyed talking about who helps us in the community, what their job names are, and even discussed what number to call in an emergency.

👮‍♂️ Police Officers & Detectives

The children loved becoming police officers, using fantastic language as they role‑played with their friends. They made painted fingerprints and then turned into detectives, carefully examining the prints.

🩺 Doctors & Nurses

Our song of the week was Miss Polly Had a Dolly, and the children brought it to life through role play. They took turns being Miss Polly and the doctor looking after our babies, practising speaking, listening, and acting out familiar scenarios.

🔥 Firefighters & Number Recognition

We practised our number recognition using our numbered fire flames, matching numbers and talking about what we could see. Some children extended this by mark‑making the numbers in our fiery sand trays, strengthening early writing skills.

🛟 Lifeguards & Water Rescue

During water play, the children became lifeguards, rescuing sinking boats and helping people in pretend emergencies.

🧰 Doctor Playdough & Creative Equipment

Our doctor playdough station was a big hit. The children were very creative and tried to make their very own stethoscopes, bandages and thermometers whilst talking about the equipment doctors and nurses use.

🚒 Arts & Crafts: Fire Engines & Doctor Bags

For our crafts this week, the children got creative building fire engines using shaped card. They also made doctor bags, carefully cutting out the equipment they wanted to include — brilliant for scissor skills and independence.

😁 Dentist Tuff Tray

Our dentist tray was extremely popular. The children cleaned teeth, counted teeth, and acted out being dentists, learning about caring for our mouths while practising counting and role play.

📚 Book, Sign & Sound of the Week

• Book of the Week: When I Grow Up
• Sign of the Week: Nurse
• Jolly Phonics Sound: “o” — explored through songs, actions, and playful sound games.